Re: creation of a directory

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Paul,
 
> It's done so that if you write:
> 
>     foo: bar/
> 
> in one place in your makefile, and:
> 
>     bar: biz
> 
> another place, and:
> 
>     boz: $(CURDIR)/bar
> 
> in a third place, make realizes they are all the same target and won't
> try to build them multiple times (or, say "don't know how to build ..."
> for one or more of them).

Well, on the one hand, I tend to agree it makes sense since on the file
system level foo and foo/ are the same (well, if foo is a directory,
to be precise). On the other had, implicit rules in make are based on
the ability to identify a constant prefix or suffix that determines a 
type  of a target (e.g., '.c' implies that it's a C source file, etc). 
Thus, by stripping trailing slash, make disables the use of quite a 
natural suffix that could be used to 'typify' directories. Therefore, 
it is not clear to me that doing so is a right thing to do. But, anyway, 
it is not for me to decide...
 
>   bk> For example, $(dir) does not strip the trailing slash. Oh, but $(@D)
>   bk> does...
> 
> These are user functions.  I'm talking about make's internal
> representation of the target name, that it uses to walk the DAG.

I was just trying to point out that GNU make's way of dealing with
directories is not very consistent.

hth,
-boris

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